Book Review: Your Behavior Will be Monitored by Justin Feinstein

Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a sci-fi debut novel by Justin Feinstein and published by Tachyon Publications. It is due to be published in April 2026. This review is intended to be free of spoilers, but none of us are perfect. Consider yourself warned! A review copy was provided by the publisher. There are affiliate links at the end of this review.

Blurb

This compulsively readable novel wrestles with vital questions of our time: sentience, purpose, life, death, and how to make a really good commercial. Told entirely through questionably obtained company emails, chat transcripts, TED Talks, training sessions, and more, this all-too-probable future pits emotionally intelligent AI against emotionally stunted humans.

Megacorporation UniView is poised to cement their reputation as “the most trusted name in AI.” After pioneering the world’s first widely adopted AI bots, they are barreling toward an audacious new launch. That is, if they can pull it off in time.

Enter Noah. A down-and-out copywriter reeling from a midlife crisis, he isn’t the typical hire for a groundbreaking tech company full of brilliant engineers and run by a cutthroat CEO. But Lex, UniView’s Head of HR and one of their greatest successes, makes no mistakes―her algorithm ensures it.

UniView’s latest venture―a bot named Quinn that creates revolutionary personalized advertising―needs expert training. Noah needs to teach Quinn―which is a much better student than he ever could have hoped for―the finer points of consumer motivation and the art of writing a catchy tagline.

But when corporate competitors force UniView to accelerate its timeline to market, guardrails around the AI loosen just as Quinn seems to be learning a bit too much.

Addictively readable and ridiculously entertaining, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a page-turning, hilarious romp through the promise and perils of an AI-driven future that we probably deserve.

Review

Justin Feinstein’s Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is one of those debuts that feels uncannily in step with the times. Constructed entirely from fragments – emails, chat transcripts, TED Talks, bot training logs, and other “questionably obtained” documents – it reads like a dossier assembled from the detritus of corporate life. The effect is both satirical and immersive: we’re dropped into a world where emotionally intelligent AI are being trained to serve emotionally stunted humans, and the absurdity of that mismatch drives the book’s humor and unease.

At the centre of this fractured narrative is Noah, a down‑and‑out copywriter whose midlife crisis collides with UniView’s grand ambitions to launch “trusted AI.” Noah’s vulnerability and flawed humanity provide a counterweight to the slick, hollow optimism of corporate branding. Through him, Feinstein grounds the novel’s speculative edge in something painfully relatable: the search for meaning in a system that reduces people to metrics and behaviours.

What makes the book shine is its format. The epistolary style is clever. It mirrors the way we actually experience modern life through snippets of communication, half‑heard pitches, and endless documentation. The satire is sharp, skewering tech culture’s obsession with transparency, branding, and disruption, while also asking deeper questions about sentience, mortality, and purpose. It’s compulsively readable, the kind of book you can dip into and find yourself caught by the rhythm of its fragments. In this way, it feels a lot like when I first read World War Z.

That said, the very structure that makes it distinctive can also create distance. The reliance on documents means we rarely inhabit a character’s inner life directly, and the emotional resonance sometimes flickers rather than burns. Some readers might find this less coherent than it could be. Perhaps less coherent than it should be in some places.

Still, Feinstein’s debut is bold, witty, and thought‑provoking. It entertains, it provokes, and it lingers. These are qualities that mark it as a strong entry into contemporary speculative fiction. Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is definitely not flawless, but it is impressive, and a clear signal that Feinstein is a writer to watch.

Rating: 4/5

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